This is a quick, fun read. What makes it work is the voice, and the very delicate balance of both irony — you’re invited to identify with the character but also distanced from her — and outrageousness (how seriously are we meant to take all this?). Which is to say, there’s room, I think, for a variety of opinions on the issues of campus sexual politics that the novel explores (it’s the story of a professor whose husband, also a professor, is being investigated for sexual misconduct). But meanwhile, it’s a pretty entertaining quasi-thriller.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the ending is completely ridiculous — it’s where the novel leans hardest into its outrageousness (in the sense of blatant romance fantasy), and one could argue that it needs to do so, precisely to emphatically insist that it’s not intended to be a realist work, which seemingly allows it to sidestep questions of what it wants to accomplish as a political critique (but of course we all know that romance is deeply political…). So I’m not sure whether to consider the ending flawed or necessary. And that, of course, makes me appreciate it, because its clunkiness serves to make me think about what the book as a whole is doing, and I love that kind of thing almost as much as I love a good ending.
Kasia Reads 